HP To Acquire Storage Software Developer IBRIX

Hewlett-Packard on Friday said it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire IBRIX, a developer of file-serving software that provides data protection, management and availability to scale-out and cloud computing environments.

IBRIX, of Billerica, Mass., an HP technology partner for about three years, brings HP about 53 employees and more than 175 enterprise customers in the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, health care and financial services markets.

These are markets where customers need to store and access millions of files in a cost-effective, easily managed way, said Milan Shetti, CEO of IBRIX.

IBRIX also is a strategic partner to HP archrivals EMC and Dell.

IBRIX is the developer of IBRIX Fusion, a purpose-built NAS platform that scales in capacity to up to tens of petabytes in a single global namespace, with performance measured in tens of GB per second and millions of IOPs (I/Os per second).

With IBRIX Fusion, customers can scale bandwidth and storage capacity independently and nondisruptively, using industry standard servers and storage and leveraging a customer's existing infrastructure.

Once the acquisition closes, as is expected to happen within 30 days, HP will integrate IBRIX into HP's unified storage organization within its StorageWorks division, said Jeff Hausman, vice president of unified storage for HP's StorageWorks.

IBRIX complements HP's storage portfolio and provides customers with greater flexibility in terms of converging their storage and compute architectures into a single architecture, Hausman said.

Because of the three-year partnership between the two companies, the IBRIX software already works with all HP products, and so the integration of IBRIX into HP will be simple, Hausman said. "In some ways, it's more of a packaging question," he said.

HP channel partners who in the past were not able to participate in the scale-out market can now do so with the IBRIX technology, Hausman said. Partners will be able to address new markets and offer additional services to customers, he said.

There are several smaller vendors participating in the scale-out storage market, wrote Jayson Noland, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co., in a research paper on the acquisition.

These include Isilon Systems, Panasas, ParaScale, Caringo and Exanet, and to a more limited degree, EMC's Atmos offerings, Noland wrote.

Despite the acquisition of IBRIX, Noland wrote that it should have no impact on any HP plans to acquire other storage, networking or security companies to fill out its portfolio.

Terms of the IBRIX acquisition were not released.